Google’s new headquarters balances its utopian desire for transparency with its very real need for privacy.

Image Gallery: Best and Worst Workplace Design | BNET

Phenomenal designers

I have a habit of putting sticky notes on the edge of my monitor. Usually these notes consist of mantras I come up with based on something I’ve learned or read recently. I have to change it up about once a week because if I get too used to seeing it, I start ignoring it.
Meet StickyScreen

My new mini-project takes the note off the edge of your monitor and puts it smack dab in the middle. The idea is to set StickyScreen as your homepage so that your ‘note to self’ shows up whenever you open a new tab or browser window.

Google Office Zurich presentation by Topseo.org

Inspirational offices

Basement Systems web team works in the coolest work environment in Connecticut. The Treehouse was built in 3 weeks by Basement Systems employees and volunteers. Play the video above and see some pictures of The Treehouse.

Clive Wilkinson Architects. The work these people do is simply groundbreaking. I’d love to work in a place they had designed. A personal favorite of mine is Pallotta Teamworks HQ. Fast Company had a great article on Clive Wlkinson. But why not visit the masterminds themselves.

Skype has offices in Tallinn, Tartu (both in Estonia), Luxembourg, London, Prague, Stockholm, San José, São Paulo, Hong Kong and Tokyo. They all have their own character, but the relaxed atmosphere is the same wherever you go. So at this time here's a short video from our Tallinn office, which also happens to be our largest. And with the most pets

Barista continues to receive Apple love! This time we've discovered that they've included Barista on Apple Store iPhones via the screensaver demos that run while consumers browse.

Plugins/Plugin Compatibility/2.8

Bots vs Browsers – database of 313,755 user agents and growing

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading "Sponsored Links") as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:

* Google Webmaster Guidelines
* Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.

If you're thinking about hiri

AskApache Google 404 is a must-have WordPress plugin that uses some ajax and a couple tricks to display a very helpful and SEO Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site.

I’m not going to talk about the much repeated permalink editing or heading changes here. Instead, I’m going to share with you some SEO tips for WordPress that you might not have bothered to check, the fine details that is. Keep in mind that some of them are the result of recent updates from Google. Let’s go.

I’ve recently noticed some posts on the BuddyPress forums where people are having problems getting WordPress MU and BuddyPress running locally on their machine.

I spent some time today to put together a twenty minute video that will show you how to set up and run WordPress MU and BuddyPress locally on a Mac. There is a tool you can use that will make this very easy called MAMP. For those of you running Windows, there is a similar tool called WAMP that will basically do the same thing.

I also make use of Textmate in this screen cast to edit the hosts file, if you don’t use it you can simply open the Finder, use the “Go” menu, and then the “Go to folder” option. Enter /etc/ as the folder and then scroll to the “hosts” file and use the editor of your choice. If you are familiar with the terminal you can also use your command line editor of choice.

I highly recommend you turn on the HD option for this video and make it full screen, that way you’ll easily be able to read and follow along

Brush Pilot™ is a fast and easy application for previewing Adobe® Photoshop® and Adobe Photoshop Elements Brushes (.abr), built exclusively for Mac OS X. Brush Pilot is designed to save you time by allowing you to instantly preview your brushes without having to load them into Photoshop.

The immediate issue that you will notice is that the wallpaper displays the same image on both screens. This is especially annoying when you have a laptop and a second monitor, each running at different resolutions, because the second screen will have a “squashed” version of the picture.

Enter Desktop Items…. you can create a web item and put a picture on it to cover the second monitor. Here’s how to do it.

What's happening today on twitter

This amazing flickr group now has its own blog — the Inspiration Boards Blog — sharing interviews with some of the creative people whose boards are featured here. Please check it out!

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Limited Edition of Moleskine Helvetica – Black Edition.

Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites (example), it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.

Squarespace certainly deserves some credit for innovating with this type of campaign – Moonfruit even acknowledged this in an email to us, writing “We did learn something from the squarespace guys and we respect they did it successfully first, but we believe we’ve done it a little better.” And we agree – by actually delivering the product they’re promoting, Moonfruit is running a completely transparent, highly viral campaign that will most likely be worth far more than the cost of 10 MacBooks when completed.

An easier way to share screenshots has finally arrived. Simply press the ScreenSnapr Hotkey (Ctrl + 1), and almost instantly have access to a URL to share on IM, Twitter, Email, or any other virtual medium. So go ahead, take a Screenshot. It's a Snap! (MAC users have a built in Command+SHift+4 so we are already good to go.

If your looking to run a Private Friends and Family Website, look no further! John Kolbert just did everyone a HUGE favor by releasing the WordPress Plugin Absolute Privacy.

Here is a short tutorial on how to create an additional WordPress menu that only shows up if a user is logged in. I use this technique to create admin front end interface menus for the most used tasks: writing and editing posts and pages, editing the current post , a direct link to the “manage” Section of the WordPress admin Interface etc.

Have you ever experienced the tedium and frustration of having to repeatedly type your name, e-mail address, home page url, or other words or phrases again, again and again? Do you frequently need to quickly insert images like your signature, location plan, or company logo into documents? Do you often introduce typos or misspelled words when typing text?

Are you looking for automatic text software that handles such issues for you?

Typinator is an automatic text software that boosts your productivity and eliminates errors by automating the process of inserting frequently used text and graphics and auto-correcting typing errors.

More and more clients are using WordPress as their CMS. As a designer or developer, you should really get into WordPress coding. To get started, you can read my WordPress theme guide and hacks. Now, I would like to recommend a resourceful WordPress site to you called WpRecipes. This post contains over 20 recipes that I hand picked from WpRecipes. If you have any good WordPress code or hacks that you want to share, feel free to send them over and I will post it.

Tutorials – defining the Internet through beautiful design

Use this 130-point checklist to help you improve your blog faster and more effectively than ever before. Feel free to grab the printer-friendly version (PDF, 69 KB).

The two-day DDB conference in London, sponsored by Broadcast magazine, brought together representatives of the UK government, the BBC, BSkyB, ITV, Virgin Media and other broadcasters with executives from Hulu, NBC Universal and Google. Media agencies and consultancies also took part.

2.8.1 Beta 2 is ready for testing. Download it, check out the changes since beta 1, and review all tickets fixed in 2.8.1.

Skype is probably the most widely used Internet Phone service for conducting telephonic interviews, panel discussions, conference calls, recording podcasts or plain voice chatting. To date over 190 million people have downloaded the Skype program.

Though Skype doesn’t provide native support for recording voice conversations yet, you can easily record Skype Call Sessions using third-party add-ons or hardware devices or even with software that already exists on your computer. The Skype Phone calls are recorded to regular audio files like MP3, WAV or Windows Media which can edited and shared with friends like regular media files.

"The Hole-On Ex is a complete do-it-yourself pinhole camera kit. All the parts needed are printed on heavy durable cardstock, die cut and scored for easy assembly. A metal pinhole aperture is included. Step-by-step instructions mean the camera can be ready for shooting in less than two hours using standard 35mm film (not included). Assembly requires only white school glue. Pinhole cameras have no optical lens, only a pinhole that lets light in when the shutter is opened exposing the film. The resulting photos are instantly artful with a softer, almost glowing illumination."

KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts.

Capturing and adding video to your marketing and social media mix has become a necessary and increasingly expected part of creating your overall marketing message. With each passing day this task just seems to get easier. Camera prices have fallen while quality has risen, editing software is free and simple to use, and video hosting and streaming from sites like YouTube provide most of the heavy lifting when it comes to putting those videos online.

If you get an error like this, there is a plugin or other function called in your theme which you don’t have. How do you fix this? There are a few ways: remove the code, error proof it, get the necessary plugin, or upgrade WordPress if necessary. In this quick WordPress tip post we’ll go over how to error proof these with a conditional tag and PHP function known as: function_exists.

Let's say you want to delete a backup from an external drive you don't need anymore. This backup will be millions of files if it includes all the system files. If you want to delete such large amount of files using the Finder's Empty Trash command it may take you hours.

A simple trick in Terminal will reduce the time by 40% to empty your trash significantly. Carefully enter this command:
sudo rm -r

Google Voice, the company’s service for managing your various phone lines, is finally opening up to more people. Starting today, the company is sending out invites to users who have been requesting them since the service – formerly known as GrandCentral – re-emerged back in March.

If you’re not familiar with Google Voice/GrandCentral, it’s essentially a service for customizing how people can reach you by phone. For example, you can set it up to ring your landline, office, and cell simultaneously when your significant other calls. Meanwhile, you can push calls from slightly less important people directly to voicemail.

All of this is done through the Web, where Google (Google) gives you a single number that in theory becomes your permanent phone number, since even if you move or switch cell providers, you can use Google Voice to re-route calls. There are other smart features too, like voicemail transcription, options to search your text messaging archives, and the ability to make calls

“For me, iDVD has always been the redheaded stepchild of the iLife suite. While I’ve used Garageband to make songs, iPhoto to manage photos (until I got Aperture), iWeb to make websites, and iMovie to make movies, until recently I’d never once tried to use iDVD to put together a DVD project. I’ve spent the past week trying to put together a DVD of our first year in New Zealand to share with our family back in the States, and while the movie’s turned out great, getting there has definitely not been half the fun.”